Posted
by
kdawsonon Friday February 26, 2010 @12:32PM
from the fresh-bits dept.

donadony writes "Last Monday PC-BSD 8.0 was released. PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD and uses KDE as its default desktop environment. PC-BSD is designed to make BSD much easier for desktop use. The 8.0 release includes support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA drivers on amd64 and improvements in the USB subsystem. The PC-BSD team has also developed a friendly package manager system with a simple-to-use GUI tool (see the screenshots tour). For a full list of changes, refer to the changelog."

The problem with ZFS root is that you need ZFS support in the boot loader, which cannot be hooked in by default for license reasons (loader is BSD, ZFS code is CDDL, all non-BSD stuff must be enabled by the user after 1st boot), but a few months back FreeBSD implemented a separate ZFS enabled boot loader for -CURRENT. All they lacked at last check was sysinstall hooks for doing it all.
Maybe you should file a PR asking for zfsboot to be backported to 8-STABLE in FreeBSD so that PC-BSD can have it in 8.1 as

I'll second the need for RAM. I like virtual machines, use them a lot. I wouldn't consider building VM's on a machine with less than two full gig of memory, and really consider 3 gig to be minimum. 4 gig or more are in order if you're going to run multiple machines at the same time. Even if the individual VM's are only allocated a half gig of memory, there is overhead involved.

Most people will say you need more RAM; they are wrong. What you need is more ram reserved for the kernel. The basic problem is that the ARC (file system cache) has no upper limit, but kernel addressable memory does.

I used to use XiG Acclerated X Linux binaries on top of the linux abi on FreeBSD 3.3 back in the day, because the Voodoo3 drivers were better than the 'native' ones for XFree86 where at the time. I wouldn't try sticking network drivers or anything in, but I'm not really a kernel expert. There is an ndiswrapper-type thing for FreeBSD/PC-BSD if you need that for wifi, though.

The layer is for the ABI, in other words the Application Binary Interface (it's like the API of a Kernel for applications). This is because FreeBSD is not Linux. With Linux the drivers are from within the kernel, or somewhat outside of it with modules.

However... If you want open source graphics drivers (I am sorry... I do not know your level of knowledge/expertice so just ignore what I am about to say if it makes you go like *whoooosh*;) ) than these are tied into X.org (the graphical foundation upon which

I should expand on that, really what FBSD binary emulation is... is just syscall emulation. You still use all the Linux libraries (some slightly patched to be more efficient on FBSD under the emulated syscall interface, but essentially unchanged and unchanged versions directly from a linux box will work).

The only thing the emulation layer does is tell the runtime linker to use a different syscall interface and a different library path for Linux libs, with some minor patches to the linux libs to make thing

Except the OSX GUI really isn't an open standard, though there's been some work in that direction by third parties working on an API compatible UI layer. I'm actually hoping to see it gain some steam in the next few years, as remote X11 really isn't such a good thing at today's higher resolutions, and disconnected networks.

What Apple does is that they recycle open source bits for their own use, and they happened to use some BSD stuff, but Mac OS X is by far not based on BSD! Let's start with the fact that Mac OS X has two kernels instead of one... So there you go...

And also, Apple does occaisionally contribute some stuff back to FreeBSD, so in some sense BSD's marketshare is also a bit of Apple's by your definition...

And this is a BIG improvement over version 7. Still some bugs to be worked out, but it's got far better integration with the PBI installer (similar to synaptic), a very good GUI installer, and the very latest nvidia drivers.

Actually PBI isn't much like synaptic at all... it's more like sandboxing, where each application has all of its' dependancies. The hard part is there wasn't much in place for dependence on packaged frameworks like Java, Mono, Python, Ruby etc, in order to have some things centralized for applications that run under these environments. This may have changed, to be honest the last time I really looked into it was around PC-BSD 5-6. I had it as part of my tagline/summary for a while. I honestly like PC-BS

I couldn't agree more with the 'getting to a desktop' part. There are some gotchas and some non-intuitive steps to getting KDE or Gnome running on a BSD box (like installing X11, configuring/etc/ttys and whatnot). So PC-BSD is very good at being a clicky-clicky come back later to a desktop kind of thing.

I still prefer the FreeBSD vanilla, just because I don't care for KDE, but I very much respect what they've done.

Anything complimenting BSD on/. tends to get an initial troll mod I've found. It's amazing how much hate Linux users have for it.

My experience is quite different from the above AC (of course, both are anecdotal, take your grain of salt - and mine are with FreeBSD, not BSD in general). FreeBSD users tend to be pretty laid back, if it isn't working, they recognize it. They may not care, they don't need it, or they may be working on it.

Linux users tend to get up in arms if you don't treat FreeBSD like the second coming of satan for taking away a small amount of their user base and development power, when Linux is obviously the true and correct solution.

There's this saying, "Linux is for people who hate Microsoft, BSD is for people who love UNIX."

It's tongue-in-cheek and very debatable, of course. But isn't there an undercurrent of truth in it, that BSD fans on average are driven by a positive force, and linux fans on average are driven by a negative one?

I'm ASKING, not trolling. FYI, while I conceptually prefer BSD, in practice I'm using linux.

Linux, particularly the GNU/FSF types, tend to be more ideologically motivated, I find, and I think most of the hate against Free/Net/Open BSD is hate against the BSD license because it doesn't fit into their framework of how the world should be. They're the ones that are going to be on about "software freedom" and all that, rather than "this works, let's use it."

Case in point, I mentioned above that I actually paid money for a commercial X server about 11 years ago. If BSDi BSD/OS hadn't been $1000, I'd probably have bought the "commercial" BSD, too. However, FreeBSD tended to get most of the worth while improvements rolled back from BSDi, and it only cost me like $30 to order it on CD-ROM (the dark days of dial-up and all that). My current company uses FreeBSD as the basis of our product to avoid GPL issues, as does Juniper and others. The FSF-types, of course, aren't going to be down with that and look at it as "theft" (never mind the fact that I know my company, and possibly Juniper as well, have committers on the pay roll) or something.

I think it has to do with the fact that Linux is more readily obtained and there has been a concerted effort to recruits new users. Its sort of like the Mormon Unix, in a way. What this means in practicality is that there is a large portion of the user base that has the "zeal of the convert" -- I'm not going to say that I didn't feel that way when I was 12/13/14 years old and was first starting out, but it's a real thing. As Theo once said, 'bsd is for people who love unix; linux is for people who hate microsoft.' That's kind of a classic troll, but its kind of true, too, to an extent.

I think that the type of people who are into BSD are generally older, have more experience in the industry, and are less ideologically driven in their OS choice than say, high school kids who saw pretty screen shots carefully crafted to look like something out of 'swordfish' or 'the matrix' an want to be 'l33t'. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of professional, neutral-minded Linux people, but then that's going to be the difference between the RHEL/CentOS-type of users and say, Mint (which I've tried and used before and I don't hate it, but let's face it -- we're not putting that on a production server any time soon).

BSD and Linux have their places, as do Windows and MacOSX. I (obviously) prefer BSD to Linux (though I've worked as an admin on a CentOS farm before), and Mac to Windows (though I didn't really have any problems with Vista 64 Ultimate as a desktop OS, just the command line was still for crap), but I can use the other and often do, and I'm at a point in my life where just getting the work done with the minimum headache is more important than what tool i use to get it done. From what I know of Linus, he seems to be of similar mind, too.

I think most older linux users are not like that. It is only that there are many, many, young users, and they need just talk, talk, talk, as if they know the unix world. If you pull the seniority card and tell them to do some research, most of them take a more collaborative approach.

As you give a lot of negative examples of linux users, I feel obliged that I have had contacts with bsd users, who in my mind where much more ideological about their choice of licence. As if I did a crime by releasing _my_ cod

KDE took hold in the FreeBSD community because Qt wasn't its self "free software" until relatively recently. A lot of people seem to forget that, and that the reason that Gnome was started (as an official part of the GNU project) was due to wanting a "completely free" desktop. A lot of the big linux distributions couldn't or wouldn't include KDE or other Qt-based software back then because of it.

KDE projects themselves were GPL/LGPL, but not being married to the license as a pre-requesite for using Qt made it more "acceptable" in the BSD world. At least that's my take on it, having watched it all gone down.

I'll admit that I'm not crazy about the GPL but if people want to release code under it, that's their prerogative. I don't like KDE 'cause I think its ugly and unwieldy and frankly, I prefer Gnome to KDE... not that I really like Gnome much either, but oh well.

That stuff aside, I think the issue both of us were talking about really just boils down to "damn kids, get off my lawn." Hell, I'm only 26 myself, but this is my authentic 5-digit ID. I like to think I grew out of the b.s. a long time ago.. plus, I never liked 'swordfish'.

One of the nicest things about PC-BSD is the whole PBI idea, which are basically like.pkg files on OS X. When installing apps via PBIs, you get all the dependencies in one shot, which means you don't destabilise your whole system when installing from a central repository where app A requires a library version that breaks apps B, C, D.... This is particularly true when you want to use third party repositories.

PBIs are simply downloaded and installed from places like http://www.pbidir.com/ [pbidir.com], the process is graphical, and they are easily uninstalled without fuss.

Well, like I said, OS X uses a similar system already. Unfortunately, similar efforts on Linux never went anywhere, so users are locked into the vendors' repositories, unless they are knowledgable/brave and use third party ones.

Weirdly, it's these same people who often complain about iPhone lock-in with the app store...just saying.

Wait wait... downloading and installing a deb from a third party requires knowledge and bravery (apparently it's very scary to click the download link, then 2x click the package in Nautilus and say "yes" when it asks if you want to install it), but using a PBI is all beauty and light?

It's not just disk inefficient, it's memory inefficient, too. In fact, this is really the definition of bloat. Every application that uses Gnome, Gtk, KDE, Qt, or some other large package might have to be shipped with a full set of libraries, all of which would have to be loaded into memory at runtime (no code sharing, since the libraries aren't actually shared). That's a *very* silly thing to do for, I would contend, a relatively small gain in user convenience.

All PBIs are a delta snapshot of a specific PC-BSD release, and then whatever that app needs to run.

Therefore a PBI built on 8.0-RELEASE will not install on a PC-BSD 7 system. At all. It won't partially install and break things, it just won't install.

That's the whole point of the design. It's like someone else said with the app store, or like building from ports. If your system is wrong, it stops and says "Sorry". It won't break your system. The PBI builder is designed to be

All PBIs are a delta snapshot of a specific PC-BSD release, and then whatever that app needs to run.

Ah, interesting, I see. So if someone built Amarok against a newer version of KDE, then it'd be shipped with KDE in the package. Otherwise it'll just use the base version, because that was what it was built against.

So you still have to build packages against a given release, just like you do in any other distro. It just gives the package builder freedom to build against a n

The problem is that the 3rd party package has to be correctly constructed and play nice with other packages in the repository. I've had all sorts of problems with this using the OpenOffice.org from PPA. It does weirdness with the language packages and after installing from the PPA it would be impossible to get localization configuration to believe the languages were properly installed. The same thing can happen where a system breaks because a non-repository package writes a file and suddenly you can't inst

It does when somebody updating a new library doesn't bother to double check that all the function calls for the old library work the same way in the new library, and your.deb requires the updated library.

Now if you need to update the software dependent on that function that was changed you're hosed and you'll have no idea what caused it.

Yes, but if your distribution is sane (ie is Debian) and you're sane (ie not using Unstable), you won't have a version of Gimp that requires libraries that the rest of your distribution can't use, unless you try to get it from somewhere else.

As a mostly Mac and Windows user I adore PBI's. Don't get me wrong a package manager is good stuff too, but PBI's are very farmiliar to those of us tied to non-free OS's. Free-BSD really is a great OS frankly, if only it had games!

SLRN? I'm not *that* old-school. I'm simply spoiled by the graphical newsreaders that have been available for Windows for so many years. I want easy, automatic handling of binaries, rar files (including repairs), yenc, and everything else. I want to point, click, and have my ISO. Or my set of jpgs. Or my discussion thread.

Under Linux, I've used Pan but it has some problems and lacks all the features I can get from Windows newsreaders. I've tried various Windows newsreaders under Wine but they've all

Sounds like you get a lot of redundant libraries that way. Why not just go back to statically linking everything if you're going to do that? The proper solution is to support multiple versions of a library in your package manager. I don't know why package managers don't do that.

Seriously, redundant libraries were a big deal 15 years ago, now it's just smart.

Repeat after me: Redundancy is a good thing, not a bad thing.

The proper solution is to support multiple versions of a library in your package manager. I don't know why package managers don't do that.

Because it's freaking hard to get right. See all of Microsoft's efforts to deal with this, it's the #1 flaw of the dll system (any shared library system, actually) and it has been from the start, the system used in.Net is their best effort so far - it uses manifests for each library to track and point software to the correct ve

Now multiply those sizes by the number of processes you're currently running, as the lack of shared libraries means no shared code pages. Suddenly RAM usage spikes, your disk cache is wasted, and performance drops as a consequence. Yeah... gr

What? Just because the package is included doesn't mean it gets installed. A shared library installed by one app is still used and shared by other apps.

This is no different than Windows games including the directx installer and running it as part of their own install. After the first install, the rest of the games you install that also install directx only update it if they are newer or have special versions of the files, you don't install a new copy every time.

The best answer I've seen is basically that *BSD is a much more cohesive experience, with a smaller number of contributors and a project that is under tighter control. This has some real downsides - progress is slower in some areas - but things also feel more unified, like they came from one source rather than many.

Mind you, a good Linux distribution will do its best to give you that same impression, and there are always going to be programs that don't look or act quite like anything else on the system, but

Why do we need Linux for the desktop? While Windows has the best hardware support coverage among all operating systems, I am curious what are the reasons behind picking Linux for a desktop oriented operating system.

While Windows has the best hardware support coverage among all operating systems

That's not true. Linux supports a much greater set of hardware. Since we're not at the mercy of the vendor to keep their drivers updated, Linux is often able to support old hardware that new versions of Windows won't. Not to mention all the architectures Linux has been ported to.

While Windows has the best hardware support coverage among all operating systems,

This is not quite true. Don't count on Windows supporting legacy hardware, specialized custom-built industrial/hobby hardware, or even decent media drivers (because of the pressure from the movie/content/cable industry).

You mean you can't find it because this [netcraft.com] shows Linux ahead of FreeBSD (for reliability)? Or this [phoronix.com], where several different Linux distros beat FreeBSD soundly in most benchmarks?

Sorry, but your nonsense about FreeBSD performing better than Linux is just that: nonsense. In some cases it does, in other cases it doesn't. Use the tool you think suits you best (and there are plenty of reasons to prefer BSD), but claims that FreeBSD generally performs "better" is just delusional fanboy bullshit. It's still a good, c

Audio for one. BSD audio mixes everything in the kernel with no nasty incompatible user space audio servers. Ever had a Linux app refuse to play audio because it was configured for ESD while you happen to be playing something through ALSA? It should "just work" and on BSD it does.

Why we need the BSD kernel for desktop? While the Linux kernel has the best hardware support coverage among all open source kernels, I am curious what's the reasons behind to pick BSD for a desktop oriented distro.

FreeBSD makes a great developer's desktop, at least for those of us who know how to do what we need to with the CLI (presumably PC-BSD's raison d'etre is to make that caviat obsolete). Excellent performance, satisfying consistency, and it's a very clean system. Gotta love a system whose kernel is

Why we need the BSD kernel for desktop? While the Linux kernel has the best hardware support coverage among all open source kernels, I am curious what's the reasons behind to pick BSD for a desktop oriented distro.

The only thing worse than a loaded question is one that is loaded with an unsubstantiated claim. Even if your assumption were true, the number of hardware drivers a kernel has available for it is a very naive metric for its usefulness.